I have a site!

Well…

Buddy and Friend’s relocation has been relatively painless (for the rest of you). “Why the move?” you ask.

Sadly enough, Simply Comical was practically on life support due to haphazard management and not being properly maintained within the past year. There were various issues with the site – such as frequent internal errors, sporadic outages and certain pages just not working properly that would never be addressed. The log-in issue last week was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Needless to say, Buddy and Friend is no longer associated with Simply Comical.

Since I encountered the login issue, I toiled away one a new site within the past few days and sat around for hours manually uploading comics and creating some new graphics (I also had help from some cool friends with the guest headers). I’ve been running on 4 hours of sleep per night since last week, trying to have something presentable by comic update day. Believe it or not, yes I CAN make a website, however, having someone else do it while I created more content was a nice thing to have. Sadly, I’ve learned my lesson and will probably never trust anyone else with the website unless they’re a major webcomics company with a stellar reputation.

There are advantages to me running my own site: if there’s a problem with the site, I can address it immediately instead of waiting on someone else to do it. In addition, this means I can add a lot more cool customization to the site as I see fit.

So here are the things that have changed:

Obviously the layout is now slightly different – it’s a bit sleeker and less-graphics intensive which should speed up overall site loading time

All comic pages have been better optimized for the web so that they load faster

I finally got to add the nifty facebook widget that I’ve always wanted (a lot of readers didn’t even know the comic has a facebook)

The navigation buttons have changed from the old, wonky misaligned ones

There’s a rotating header that changes when you refresh the page. Graphics contributed by my awesome artist friends!

Other than that, I’m going to add features that never worked on the old site, such as the Bestiary. I’m also going to find a better archive system involving thumbnails and I’m going to make a proper gallery section (hopefully with a fan art section). All of this will be worked on little by little. I’m going to try and add more content every 1-2 days if possible between my ridiculous holiday work schedule. I also want my damn domain name back!

So yes, it’s just me now. All by my lonesome. Drawing and doing the website stuff.